3M to end 'forever chemicals' output
reuters.com
reuters.com
Generally speaking, toxic substances are only "cheap" due to externalizing many of the costs involved, like increased healthcare costs and lost productivity. If you do a thorough analysis of the costs of using such chemicals, they aren't cheap at all.
Maybe someday humans will get that.
Seems like yet again corrupt and incompetent regulators and oversight fails, and real action only really happens when the courts are used to hold them to account for damages.
EDIT: Maybe those libertarians do have a good idea now and again...
I suspect it's one of the hardest problems to solve in any universe.
I went to Las Vegas about a year ago on a work trip and realized that the hotel I stayed at uses more plastic bottles in an hour than I would use in my lifetime with no thought to conserving them.
All this to say that tragedy of the commons is an extremely hard problem to solve, even when you know about it and care.
I constantly repeat to myself “no single drop of rain thinks it’s responsible for the flood” and try not to think of that Vegas hotel.
There will always be detractors saying we should just make people want to make the right choice, but all it takes is one person in a company to make a decision that outweighs the collective efforts of millions.
It makes absolutely no difference if i minimise my plastic or diligently sort them for recycling because a Vegas hotel will make all my efforts for naught.
Climate change is already here and there is nothing the individual can do about it. The optimum play now is to accept that the group is useless and make individual steps to mitigate the effects on you personally.
Sorry, never nice doing a pre-7am nihilism dump.
Get a stainless steel container and hydrate for a lifetime.
It's the insane amount waste and environmental pollution that single-use plastic generates that is the problem.
Best choice is to insist on glass packaging wherever you can. It's inert and infinitely recyclable.
Whole being thirsty isn’t optimal the actual risk of something serious happening is negligible. Especially since I monitor my urine color and other signs. It’s more convenience and the habit of convenience we’re all so used to these days.
I’m not so sure about that. Some people are more susceptible to it than others. There’s also some weird trait that makes some people drink less water than others. Both my father and myself seem to share this trait. We have to force ourselves to drink water. For whatever reason, I could go an entire day without drinking water. Not sure why it is, but it causes problems. I was on vacation with my father and he collapsed in literally the middle of nowhere because of dehydration. It was pretty scary and he almost didn’t survive.
My mother in law was hospitalized twice for dehydration. She is mindful of it and still some days she doesn’t drink enough. Drinking is hard for her as other commenters mention here too. After that I just started drinking an extra liter of tea by just carrying the bottle around. Even the extra peeing stopped after a few weeks.
This strikes me as something constantly asserted but never proven. It should be pretty trivial to find out if this is the case, medically, so there should be data. I went ahead and searched around and although I see a lot of headlines about it, there is a lack of definitive corroboration. I found these sources:
"According to the lay press, 75% of Americans are chronically dehydrated. While this is not supported by medical literature, dehydration is common in elderly patients."[0]
" In fact, scientific studies suggest that you already get enough liquid from what you're drinking and eating on a daily basis. We are not all walking around in a state of dehydration."[1]
"The notion that there is widespread dehydration has no basis in medical fact"[1]
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK555956/ [1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/water-works-2/
The thing is, the majority of voters in most societies don't want those regulations.
Assuming we didn't riot ourselves to rubble, other nations will quickly outstrip us. Eventually we'd be a vassal state of another superpower. Either because they'd buy our politicians, use crises of supply shortages to force us into free trade deals which axe our externality taxes, or via outright force.
Other nations would do to us what the USA did to Latin America when those nations wanted to throttle their development for ecological reasons in the 60's and 70's.
Sustainably, we probably wouldn't even be able to keep and train a competitive military -- 6% of our nations carbon emissions are from our military, accounting for 52% of federal carbon footprint, and our military emits more GHG than 140 countries (individually/separately).
Perfect is the enemy of good.
The US could focus on lower cost - high impact externalities taxing.
It could persuade, cajole, bully its partners and allies to agree to a treaty doing the same. It did it for FATCA, for sure it can do it for climate change and general environmental destruction.
Once you have such an international treaty in place, most of the rest of the world would follow. US partners and allies are probably 70% of the world economy, and the countries with the most slack, economically, that can best afford this.
Yeah, I said governments, plural.
Why not carry a reusable water bottle? I have a great double-wall steel bottle (Hydro Flask), which is much better than a plastic bottle because it keeps water cold all day long and is basically indestructible.
In most places I travel to it's not difficult to find sources of clean, cold water to refill it. Worst case, I will buy a large bottle of water to refill it from, which at least is cheaper and generates less waste than using multiple small plastic bottles throughout the day.
[1] https://www.zojirushi.com.hk/enproductsview.php?oid=6&tid=17...
(One big problem with PTFE is that it starts to slowly decompose at a lower temperature than its melting point. This makes it messy to work with. As I understand it, the decomposition products are gasses, so this is a problem at the factory and for the environment, but I don’t think its a problem for end users.)
[1] https://www.brikksen.com/home/page/blog?p=the-different-grad...
Or just get a reusable plastic one, perfect can be an enemy of good.
Individual use of plastic is not relevant, as long as it goes to landfil and not ends up in the ocean througg recycling fraud. In UK most plastic ends up sent to poland, where it's burnt or sent onwards to Turkey where it becomes untraceable. I stopped recycling plastic because the system cannot be trusted - at least if it stays in UK you know it wont be hurting anyone.
Half of plastic waste in the ocean waste is discarded fishing nets.
Aluminum is not an amazing food contact surface — it’s quite reactive. I would not use an uncoated aluminum bottle for anything other than plain water.
The aluminium bottle I have is likely coated, I wouldn't know - i do use it just for water, and it seems fine.
The aluminium bottle I have is likely coated, I wouldn't know - i do use it just for water, and it seems fine.
(Of course, we should just reuse glass containers, like we did when I was a kid - a small deposit is a big motivator for kids to collect bottles for reuse!)
Life's too short to be worried about funny looks.
They actually dent quite easily. I have a 40oz Hydro Flask with a couple dents from an incident with a spider a couple years ago. I had my bottle on the counter top while I was eating and suddenly a spider was on it. In an attempt to kill the spider, I knocked over the bottle on to the wooden floor (trying to squish it). It dented the bottle near the top and on the bottom. I looked up some videos and it's definitely not just me. Found one where it looked like a whole family dented theirs and they used a trick with dry ice and a hair dryer to fix them. I don't know if it gets harder to fix the longer you wait. Mine still works okay, so I haven't done anything about it.
I'm pretty sure the outside is aluminum, fyi, unless they make multiple types. The inside part is probably steel.
I love my Hydro Flask and have drank more water because of it. My only complaint is that the straw lid gets a lot of crap building up in the small gaps and it seems impossible to adequately clean. Maybe an ultrasonic cleaner could do it.
I can't vouch for its durability when used to beat a spider to death because I'm not afraid of tiny harmless animals, but in every other respect I have nothing but praise.
The original standard Hydro Flask is, except the lid, entirely Type 304 stainless steel (aka: 18/8 steel), powder coated on the outside.
As for avoiding bags I have two wicker baskets like this https://www.amazon.de/-/en/gp/product/B009BMXLLI/ which means I can avoid shopping bags and they are actually quite convenient for carrying.
Tap water is luckily very drinkable in Germany (rumor has it that Coca-Cola company bottles it and sells it under their 'Bonaqua' brand).
However, there is so much out of our control with plastics that require regulation. Just think of the packaging.
But anyway, I think anywhere in London, so long as you run it through a filter (ie: Brita filter) and chill it, it tastes more or less as good as any bottled water.
Though where I live, even table water would be better than unfiltered tap water. Not because of health concerns (I actually had my tap water lab tested as the building is from the 60s), but because of limescale in the kettle and disgust on my tastebuds ;)
After the world seems to be in agreement that CocaCola and most lemonades are best served carbonated. But for water there's this weird schizm over carbonation.
It's interesting because the correct answer is that each country/region has different expectations from bottled water, mineral water.
[1] https://hydrapak.com/collections/water-bottles/products/stas... [2] https://www.katadyngroup.com/us/en/8019641-EZ-Clean-Membrane...
Most of the cartons are either lined with plastic, or they are tetra packs. Both of these options (especially tetra packs) are much more difficult to recycle and worse for the environment than simple PET bottles.
Forget shorter showers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2TbrtCGbhQ
The thing is, the motivation for given topic is always fair and just, and so are the goals, so its normal to want to do more and more. But at one point they move so far from general population they are seen as extremists, and whatever good their push is trying to achieve is completely blocked by this extreme approach and negative emotions it sparks.
Get engaged in politics, create groups, figure out who has real deciding power and apply soft pressure there... this is how good changes are done in timely manner. Other way is to wait till SHTF and there is reaction, but damage is already done like in this topic. Otherwise society just heads to division and conflict on many levels, and as for example covid showed us if you push big part of population hard/long enough they will eventually move to some outright non-smart positions that will be then very hard to abandon.
The advantage to ‘save the whales’ over save every endangered species is it’s much easier to gain traction and you can pick the easiest targets.
80% of the bang can be gotten for 20% of the buck.
I'm reasonably sure Coca Cola and co should be the biggest targets in the anti-plastic campaign.
Many of them don't even care about reducing resource consumption, they're goals are much more philosophical.
We'd wind up with wood stoves instead of solar panels. Resources consumption would go down, maybe, but it might just be because a lot of people would die.
Other than than that, obviously I'm all for improving society and all.
Single use plastic is way better than recycled plastic at slowing global warming.
China banned the import of waste in 2018. But other countries do still import it.
Not where I live (northeastern USA), where the vast majority of discarded plastic ends up in landfills. Virtually none gets "washed (or dumped) into the ocean"; the minor exception is trash dropped by thoughtless people.
In many parts of the world, this is completely normal, unfortunately, not a "minor exception". Even here the UK, canals and rivers are often full of floating plastic bottles, bags, and other litter. I know because I've volunteered to clean it up: the quantities we pull out is insane. And a few weeks later, it's all back again. Frustrating and sad.
There are entire continents that essentially dump most of their (plastic) trash straight into rivers (and thus oceans). Looking at you (South East) Asia...
Recycling plastic is very hard as a single product is often a combinaison of different kind of 'plastics', which happen to be a generic name for different materials, and which impose different kind of treatment for each of them. Colored plastics add up to the issue as you can't recycle different colored plastic of the same kind together...
For example, a single coca-cola bottle is typically made of 3 kind of plastics : the bottle itself (transparent), the cap(red with white or black scripting), and the wrapping around of the bottle (made of 2 or 3 different colors).
And that's nothing compared to toothpaste tubes, which was taken as an example in a recent 'Der Spiegel' issue to illustrate the ecologic nightmare plastics represent. And let's not forget ketchup plastic bottles, which is also some kind of marvel of assembled plastic enginering.
Plastic recycling is currently more a matter of vertue signaling than a reality as only 1 to 5 percent of plastic (I don't know the exact numbers) is curently recycled worldwide.
In western world (or at least in europe), most of them are incinerated in electricity thermal generators or buried in waste dumps.
Until recently, american waste (plastics) were send to China to be buried or burned, until the chinese government made it illegal.
The real indicator should be some kind of a 'plastic consumption index' by countries and/or companies and/or household, used to monitor the amount we produce it, use it and get rid of the waste.
In UK recyclers get paid by the government a small amount per ton recycled. It is , however, not enough to trully recycle anything. So they take out a few valuable plastics, and pay randpm company in poor country to tale this plastic, and to sign paperwork saying that it's going to a recycling facility. In reality it will simply be dumped, and money will be pocketed.
Then when someone complains, they pull the documents thst were signed by some random fall guy, make a surprised face, and claim they thought the plastic would be recycled.
I really think that people aren’t that fragile and the bottled water industry has done an excellent job of making people think they need to constantly hydrate in order to not have a heat stroke.
Imo it’s enough to just pay attention to yourself and how you feel.
There is literally nothing I could possibly do that could come even close to making up for that...
Or, if you still work in the industry and can find a way to make the shipping routes more efficient, or prevent future mistakes like that, you could make it into the green and achieve CO2 karmic heaven!
Obviously this advice is not good advice for anyone who wants to have children :)
There are ways to have children without creating your own.
That’s not to say that we should encourage them specifically to have children either; just that children represent potential in a way that the number of bunker-fuel cargo ships does not.
There is no practical way we can achieve the goal of survival for all through reduction of CO2 emissions. It's a farce because we'll never get all parties to agree.
The only path forward is to hope we have some very clever science and engineering that can help us survive this disaster.
It's a farce because it's already too late for emissions reductions to cut it. We need to pull carbon out of the atmosphere or, as you say, engineer other solutions.
But a robust solution is not going to be limited to the physical/material domain. Societies are malleable and so are people. We need to design ourselves and our activities into a vibrant planetary ecology, not throw up our hands and try to patch around historically contingent circumstances
As Octavia Butler put it, God is change, and change is not to be reacted to, but to be shaped
Could we come back from it? Hard to say.
If anything, we will not have enought humans around with our birth rate.
Technology is getting cleaner and cleaner each year: ev, solar panels, etc.
Look into Tony Seba for the energy revolution And joan Lomberg about what are our most important problems and solutions
I think we should put far less energy on climate change and more on our human problems: war, famine, poverty, corruption, etc.
If you make fewer mistakes than the person who replaced you if you quit, you will make up for your mistake eventually.
You should have no guilt over this (although efficiency is always to be aimed for). And carbon is probably the least objectionable byproduct of burning the bunker oil that fuels ships - you can't make anything that heavy burn cleanly without insane combustion temperatures.
Plus someone in your position doing a great job could probably save a ton of carbon from hitting the atmosphere.
I can say from personal experience this is not true! You can help fix other people's mistakes! I was an energy engineer for a while.
You'd be amazed just how much low-lying fruit there is in terms of energy waste. I was also GOOD at this job. Instead of doing the brainless measures, I would really dig and do a lot of modeling and data mining and stuff to figure out truly optimal solutions. My fee + cost of measures were easily covered within 1-year of savings, and yet it was an incredibly difficult sell to get people to want to spend the money.
But... I had one client, for whom I had to sign an NDA, that single-handedly blew all the others out of the water. They had been emitting LARGE (like, think ~1 ton/month) quantities of sulfur hexafluoride for years. Sulfur hexafluoride, if you don't know is 23,500 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. This had been going on for YEARS.
Our three-man team came in and was able to find all the leaks with some really nice thermal cameras so they could replace the failed seals and parts.
It becomes a sickness at some point. Check out Scott Adam’s law of slow moving disasters if you want some optimism.
It’s more that it just doesn’t seem worth it. We use a bag for a few minutes and it’s in our environment for 1000 years. It seems like such a bad trade to me.
People treat plastic bags as single use, but you can reuse them for years. I’m not saying you should seek them out, but don’t just throw them away after one use when you find yourself with some.
It takes real amounts of thought to reduce your footprint; the visible/obvious solution often isn't the right one.
In a non capitalistic, small enough community it isn't a worry.
The real problem I think is how to scale that thinking to a world population.
Is it really that hard or are we making it hard?
Calculate the hidden cost. Spend half of the cost on a marketing campaign to sway public opinion against a tax. Profit!
We have managed judicial systems. We can manage this too.
[1] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/14...
Figuring out what the alternative should look like is a big challenge but let's not pretend that that is the main issue here.
Totalitarian regimes might succeed, though.
We might get to "the selfish data"? Genes being a special case.
Global regulation around CFCs made the ozone hole shrink
The don't mess with texas anti littering campaign and similar outreach programs worldwide reduced littering
In general taxing negative externalities seems to have an effect
We could start by looking at how people managed systems sustainably including the original commons.
https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false...
Your article says that the tragedy of the commons does not have to happen, but we don't really have the numbers. Those examples could be cherry picking, and everyone's personal experience kind of says that the opposite is more common (commons mismanagement). That's why the original article was so influential: it gave a name to something we've always seen.
It's great that we can assume tragedy of the commons is not as immutable as some law of physics, but it still looks like a powerful social force unless proven otherwise.
And I imagine, like any social study, it's going to be very hard to get actual numbers for the tragedy of the commons versus comedy of the commons scenarios.
If post-brexit overfishing numbers increase, what evidence is there that the increase is due to individual greed and not a government policy?
In a single masterstroke they gained assets and labour.
Tragedy of the commons is now defined in game theory and is a naturally occurring phenomenon when people have limited resources and the drive to survive.
But life itself is incredible, we have non-oxygen using lifeforms (inefficient, the earliest lifeforms), sulphur-eating lifeforms. Life can use up almost anything, <<if it has to>>.
If it doesn't, it just leaves it alone.
No, it's not at all. It's a problem that humans encountered for millennia and solved successfully again and again.
That's what organized society is for.
the term itself was a fake argument against the commons, in favour of privatization of commons. every single word of the argument today is known to have been a falacy.
so the answer to the tragedy of the commons is to not believe in it. property is the real issue. but even thinking that way will offend your sensibilities.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-tragedy-of-t...
History offers many examples of human communities successfully managing their common resources, over generations.
Terrible people can be absolutely correct. In this case, the tragedy of the commons both exists and affects many things (like international fishing).
It is true that history shows examples of communities managing their common resources over generations. This need not be the default; when it isn't you get the tragedy of the commons. That is why its important to both understand it and to build community norms that encourage respect for common resources.
Would I be correct in my read of your take that you don't believe the tragedy of the commons exists? If it does, do the original author's other beliefs matter when discussing it?
It looks like you're agreeing that counterexamples to "tradgedy of the commons" being a default state exist in history yet your conclusion is "tragedy of the commons is the default if a better option isn't employed".
Why can't it be true(based off your same evidence) that tragedy of the commons is an unnatural state, and respect for common resources is the default?
The author of this article agrees with you, and says so; I was more interested in the latter half of the article, where he explains why "the facts are not on Hardin's side".
> Would I be correct in my read of your take that you don't believe the tragedy of the commons exists?
The privatization of the commons seems to me the much greater tragedy, leading to large-scale exploitation and irresponsible environmental degradation. From what I see, distributed networks of human-scale communities tend to manage shared resources in a sustainable way; to fuck things up on a grand scale, you need centralized power and a managerial distance from consequences.
Still, I'm grateful for your linking to this excellent critique of the source article which, among other things, provides a handy label for an ethically and morally dubious extrapolation the critique labels "lifeboat ethics" which I often seen deployed by the wealthy against the impoverished.
> an idea [Hardin] called “lifeboat ethics” [0]: since global resources are finite, Hardin believed the rich should throw poor people overboard to keep their boat above water. [1]
[0] https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil1100/Hardin.pdf (link in OP)
[1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-tragedy-of-t... (OP)
The commons work well enough, and are managed collectively.
Want to read the high-brow argument? Try: https://anarchistfaq.org/afaq/sectionI.html#seci6
Want the lived-experience argument? I live in Palestine. Palestinian villages managed their lands collectively for ages and ages, up until the 20th century. This broke down not because anybody was misusing the commons, or fencing, or whatever - it broke down because the damn Ottomans started a land registry and you got a few people making themselves official owners of huge swaths of land they should not have had any claim to. So the only tragedy was external elements disrupting the commons by force.
Just another in the long list of coordination problems where it is hard to arrive at the pareto-optimal solution given human selfishness and our lack of omniscience.
Nearly everyone does NOT own the means of production, and the few who do know exactly what’s wrong and keep on doing it to everyone but themselves until they’re forced to stop. Maybe someday we’ll realize that too.
I know it’s not popular here but I’ll say it: class analysis. You can vote with your fingers and bones. You can vote with your personal dignity. Your investment portfolios are just part of capitalism and it isn’t predestined.
Voting with your wallet is noble, but pointless. Vote with your actual vote.
3M discovered PFOS while developing rubber that wouldn't degrade when exposed to jet fuel, then marketed it as Scotchgard.
I mean don't get me wrong, I'm in favor of nuclear energy as a CO2-less high potential source of energy, it's just that they're fucking around with the waste too much and umming and arring about it while it just sits near the nuclear power plants, instead of just burying it in a mountain like they do in finland [0]). They could decomission a strip mine and fill it back up with lead-and-concrete encased nuclear waste, then bury it in another few hundred meters of sand - nobody would be the wiser for the next millennia. In theory.
[0] https://www.science.org/content/article/finland-built-tomb-s...
Competition goes beyond just companies too, countries compete with each other, to the point of starting wars over e.g. natural resources, territory, and access to infrastructure. And one future scenario is wars over more basic resources like food and water, as climate change will cause droughts and famines. At the very least it will (and already is) triggering mass migrations.
So your argument against capitalism driving pollution in the hundreds of countries around the world where it appears to be driving pollution is a single example? A country that did most of it's polluting during a rapid industrialization with the stated goal of "catching up with the west". Meanwhile during that same soviet period not one but *two* rivers caught on fire in a single year in the USA.
Which is all to say that I'm unconvinced. It really seems like the driver of most of the pollution in the world has been capitalism. Perhaps communism is worse, but that doesn't let capitalism off the hook - it's not a two-choice binary system here.
Clearly 3M has. What's unfortunate is the long feedback loop. It takes a lot of damage before it starts becoming expensive for suppliers.
We do get it. Sometimes the costs aren't known in advance, and you can't include every potential future issue in the cost/benefit calculus.
Isn't that literally what the article is pointing at? Shareholders put pressure on the company to stop this, and they are. Sounds like a success story.
3M knew for decades about the dangers of exposure to PFAS chemicals but didn’t inform the public.
During the 1970s and ’80s, it conducted studies on its US workers that showed PFAS building up in the bloodstream.
In 1977 the company determined PFOS was “more toxic than anticipated” in a study of rats and monkeys; in 1978 a monkey study had to be stopped after all the animals died within the first few days because the PFOS doses were too high.
In 1980, minutes from an internal 3M meeting said workers at the factory in Antwerp were told the chemicals had been found in human blood, but the company decided not to tell the government
Free markets are generally bad at handling pollution because the costs are so diffuse and long term; there's often a way to increase profits at the expense of someone else's health in a manner that can't be precisely quantified immediately.
That's what the litigation is.
I am skeptic that market mechanisms achieve the best outcomes at all times, but I'm positively certain they don't when externalities are not even priced in!
Maybe people would stop self destructive habits like cigarettes and alcohol...
(and maybe meat, and keeping pets)
But all current electricity use would be diverted to solar panel and battery factories for a few years.
Only rich people with solar panels could take hot showers... probably then only during sunny days.
(interesting thought experiment)
We just gloss over, or hyperfocus on areas based on current fashions.
It's a massacre TBH, mostly exposing the head-in-the-sand, umbrella using fingerpointing mentality of Belgian politics. I can imagine 3M has sites like these all over the world, so I would assume this only scratches the surface...
Edit: typos, it's early in the morning here ...
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-3m-pfas-toxic-foreve...
3M is gifting sales to it's competition to avoid future liabilities. Chinese companies are ready to pick up the slack.
3M is certainly developing safer alternatives, but until they are as good and as cheap, companies will buy their toxins elsewhere.
I'm curious as to the scope of this, and what end products are effected. A lot of the best-in-class greases (krytox) and orings (FFKM aka kalrez) rely heavily on fluoro-components. FFKM orings in particular are head and shoulders above everything else by ~100C worth of working temperature range. FKM 'Viton' orings are also incredibly popular and are widely used in automotive applications for temperature and oil resistance in addition to having major industrial uses.
[0]Fluorine is a real PITA to produce and make derivatives from - environmental issues aside functionally equivalent non-fluorine compounds would almost always be cheaper.
I wouldn't be surprised if they started using other plastics in frying pans one day, meant to be used with some fancy temperature control induction system. Lots of stuff is slippery enough for food applications, you just need one that's safe at the temperature oil gets to.
I doubt my life would be affected much at all without any fluoropolymers in goods I directly own.
Hopefully they don't contain something even more toxic than PFAS?
Gore-tex isn't going to hurt anyone unless there is dumping or leakage in manufacturing.
Before Teflon, people had pans, and they cleaned them. After teflon, people will have pans, and they will clean them.
To some degree prioritizing tech makes sense, if the tech is replacing some other thing that harms living beings more. I doubt an LED factory is environmentally perfect, but the alternative would probably be people using oil lamps in many places.
And some things are just too convenient to give up for 1 in a million possible risks, like WiFi.
But things that only benefit a small enthusiast community in nonessential ways with large costs to everyone else are just too much.
This is where legislation needs to come in.
I think the signalling is also valuable -- humans have a remarkable tendency to adopt attitudes over time, and I think every contribution towards the attitude that we should not harm the environment is a good one.
I for one currently support and will continue to support companies with sustainable environmental practises even if the cost is higher, and I encourage everyone to do the same. For, that increased cost is like a payment for that piece (however small) of the environment that I otherwise would not have, and I think that's worth it.
Long are gone the days governments around the world coordinated to banish CFCs, for instance.
Sometimes that market is the US and you only need a local bill to do that. Sometimes you do a bilateral or multilateral treaty. But these things happen all the time even today. Eg if not for trump there would probably have been a new pacific trade agreement and Biden has managed to rally multilateral cooperation around security issues around Russia (eg see new applications to NATO as one example as well as related economic agreements and sanctions) and climate change.
The main challenge is that Trump’s behavior of cancelling deals that were on the finish line as well as backing out of existing agreements (Paris accords + Iran) means that partners are now more wary of entering into agreements in the first place.
This has less to do with globalization and more to do with USA’s increasing instability as a reliable partner that can execute on agreed-upon commitments across political transitions. So now countries are less reliant on commitments from the USA. From one perspective, that’s good - local autonomy is a powerful tool. From a different perspective, the USA frequently (not always and maybe not even a majority of the time) lead the way and set a global direction through unilateral action (ie even without treaties). Again, that’s gone less because of globalization I think and more that the world has grown tired of USA’s political weight throwing and realpolitik behavior rather than sticking to common principles (democracy, rule of law, not torturing enemies no matter what they’ve done, human rights, raising up scientists and facts even when politically inconvenient or leaders applying pressure to move their voter base instead of playing tail wag the dog, having principles about who we count as our allies etc). One set of behaviors engenders trust while the other degrades it and leads to whatsboutisim politics. Agreements in low trust environments are rarer and harder to maintain. Agreements in high trust environments are much cheaper.
So, while I agree that the “governments around the world coordinating” is harder I disagree that it’s impossible or that it was caused by globalization Val multi-generational realpolitik weight throwing and underhanded behavior that killed a lot of the good will brought about as the “saviors of WWII” propaganda that was wide spread + “golden city” aura post WWII and during the Cold War + technological and economically outpacing Russia. We’ve been leveraging that good will more than our finances because the former is completely invisible and impossible to quantify and measure.
If you manufacture a chemical and the US and EU both decide that chemical is banned and can't be imported, your business may very well be toast, and you will have a large incentive to produce stuff that they want instead. This doesn't necessarily even take legislation as the relevant governments have a variety of ways they can apply tariffs, disincentives etc. to stuff they don't like.
That very same globalization sometimes causes influence as a pure byproduct.
Regardless, it's not an all or nothing situation. If there are 6000 problems, it's perfectly fine to pick just one of them, and do something that only makes it 1% better. So what there are 5999 other problems? So what most of this one problem didn't even get better because there is some way around it? Tomorrow you just keep doing more of the same and make the current problem 2% better. Or make one of the other 5999 a little better.
All progress is plodding. There is no other type.
We did fine without PFAS, we'll be okay with expensive PFAS (where externalities are internalized and built into the cost) too.
I think a lot of this need also comes from other supposedly environmental choices. My work banned plastic cups and now has paper cups with PFAS which are more toxic. I think the plastic ones were the better choice if recycled properly.
And raincoats were really really horrible before Gore-Tex.
It's not about using the money to solve the problems. It's about making the economy more efficient.
I do thing greenwashing and environmental whack-a-mole is a real problem (heck, we see it in the PFAS space with GenX replacing PFOA). I don't see that as a valid reason to do nothing.
Nope, they were fine. A bit heavier but far longer-lasting, including the waxed versions which can be re-waxed if needed to keep up waterproofing. I'm still using my army-issued raincoats from when I served in 1992, one of them has been with me on a number of expeditions (months of paddling the Yukon from Whitehorse to the Bering Strait, climbing several mountains, etc) where it doubled as a tent bottom, it is still perfectly serviceable. The lighter version I still use when cycling, it is still waterproof and the seams - which usually are the weak spot - still hold. I'm also using a 20yo wax coat which I re-waxed a few times (still using the original tin of wax), that one hardly contains any synthetics. Anything made of Gore-Tex would have delaminated after a few months of this type of use.
Being able to be dry and yet not get soaked in your own sweat was a really amazing invention.
The actual "Gore-Tex" layer, now no longer under patent and produced by many under names such as Dermizax, H2No, Sympatex and many others, is a thin, flexible, *fragile* PTFE membrane. This allows air through, and via a heat-pump-like mechanism drives water on its surfaces from the warm side to the cool side. There is no 'old school rainjacket' equivalent for this.
Usually when your Gore-Tex jacket stops working it is because the DNW layer is gone. If you used a wax replacement the actual Gore-Tex would still be fine and your rain jacket would still be miles better than anything available 100 years ago.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=gore-tex+delamination
It might work fine for a weekend hike but the stuff does not hold up to repeated strain. Eventually it'll start to delaminate at the shoulders due to wear from backpack straps, cuffs and other exposed spots. This 'eventually' will depend on what you're doing while wearing the things, as said that weekend hike won't put as much strain on it as does walking the Appalachian trail or crossing the Hardangervidda, let along climbing a few mountains. I like to use material which keeps and can be repaired if needed so for me this is a no-go. My backpacks are between 30 and 50 years old, my raingear between 20 and 30 years, my tents and sleeping bags between 20 and 25 years, my cooking gear is more than 40 years old. It may not be fashionable - who cares about fashion when you're alone in the woods - and it may not be the lightest or most high-tech but I know I can depend on it.
But I replace my gear when needed anyway and recycle it. I do hike, but not very far from the civilized world. And previously I lived in a place where it rains every day in winter (western Ireland) so good breathing raingear is really a must have.
There are also a wide range of textiles available for the outer layers. Many have high Kevlar/aramid content and are much tougher in abrasion than waxed cotton.
I have a Ventile jacket which should be the pinnacle of cotton waterproof design, and it is much easier to damage than modern synthetic jacket, and on top of this it doesn't breath as well, or keep me as dry under continuous downpour conditions. It's also harder to repair due to the high density of the fibres.
In fact, single use plastic means more oil being used for plastic and less burnt for fuel, leading to lower CO2 emissions.
Why do you need to choose between plastic or paper (PFAS)? Does your work not provide glasses? Ceramic mugs? Can you not bring your own reusable water bottle?
Teflon isn’t as great as people were deceived into believing. Even if you’re absolutely meticulous with care, it’ll have a noticeable lack in non-stick abilities within months and be noticeably sticky after 2 years, and rapidly degrading into useless territory. An iron pan starts out about as sticky as a slightly used Teflon pan and feels like brand new Teflon after a few uses and stays that way for as long as a human lifespan.
This is not to mention its widespread use in military applications. There is already concern about China's lock on the global supply of rare earths and other raw materials like silicon and magnesium (80%+ market share). What happens when the US can't make fighter jets because a belligerent China refuses to export PFAS?
A typical company also can’t easily handle, say, plutonium, but if the military needs it, an exemption is granted.
The typical consumer gets by without lead, asbestos, and so on. The consumer market will adapt.
It reminds me of the microplastics debate too. Lots of panic about it, little scientific evidence that it is causing large scale health problems.
> With many health effects noted for a relatively few example compounds and hundreds of other PFAS in commerce lacking toxicity data… [1]
If we were to wait to run studies on all of those hundreds of substances, there will just be that much more pollutant in our environments and bodies that will be virtually impossible to clean up. The risk/reward tradeoff is pretty clear.
Let's take one example. Teflon coated cookware. As an alternative there are cooking sprays, butter, oils, or stiring the contents of the pan more frequently.
In this case it's not a nessacity but a convenience. Why don't we start by restricting the use of PFAS to those products in which there are no alternatives and are a nessacity.
You can't get them hot enough to sear a steak properly without damaging the non stick coating, and the non stick coating is oleophobic which means that oil pools rather than spreading out so you can't get proper browning on anything even if you do cook it at an appropriate temp.
Seasoned cast iron and carbon steel will be non stick without either of those downsides, and even regular stainless steel is perfectly fine as long as you let it heat up properly before using it.
You can definitely cook delicate fish and scrambled eggs on say, cast iron, but you will either be scraping hard during clean up or using an absurd amount of oil to cook. I don't mind it myself, but its clear why nonstick is popular.
Not every pan is capable of this, and meticulous care is required to keep it in shape, but I became a believer in non stick cast iron when I first met a pan that could do it. I had used plenty of "stickier" cast iron pans before and my perspective shifted a bit.
And seasoning is a never ending task.
If I'm searing a steak or something at high heat, sure, it's going to leave some burnt-on marks, but if you add water and leave it simmering on minimum heat with a bit of baking soda for 15 minutes, pretty much anything will wipe off with no effort.
Now I just use stainless-steel or (rarely) cast iron, and I'm much happier.
And it's even cheaper, long-term. A decent stainless-steel pan costs $50-$200 USD, but lasts approximately forever. Whereas a decent non-stick equivalent costs $30-$50, but needs replacement every few years even if I'm careful with it.
[1] actually, like many high-end pans, it uses a 3-ply construction with an aluminium layer between two steel layers
It’s not all that much convenience you give up anyway. My home is PFA free for cookware (indoors, at least) simply by virtue of owning birds because PFA is toxic to birds. I have to use the pressure cooker and air fryer outside but the ceramic pans I use indoors do just fine and aren’t too much harder to clean vs Teflon pans.
I think the only noticeable pain where my ceramic pans clearly lose to Teflon is eggs - eggs want to cling to basically anything and Teflon is just really good at not having things cling to it. Otherwise it’s almost always just as easy to clean the ceramic pans as it is to clean the Teflon ones.
Which is great. Higher prices = less usage.
We don't have to eradicate them entirely before we see any benefit.
I'm not sure that anyone knows what the demand elasticity for an industrial chemical like PFAS is, but it's obviously not a completely discretionary item.
Don't lie to us by not mentioning the tradeoffs.
Reduced standards of living = less spare f-s to give about abstract big picture issues (like pollution and climate change).
I believe the traditional term is "setting a good example" and even if the motivation is selfish there's a positive outcome. "Virtue signaling" was invented to demonize this behavior by focusing on (the assumed) motive as selfish.
There was that huge settlement by tobacco companies, despite the fact that tobacco is still legal, because they ignored clear science for years in order to make a profit.
I don't get your argument, it's like "someone is going to do bad things therefore it's ok for me"?
Out of sight, out of mind right? Until you really need it.
By saying "just like that" you are implying the decision was sudden and without reason. That's false.
You also are basically saying "I'll be sorry" because the military needs them but are there alternatives and is it essential?
Finally you used "gross" and "messy" as a manipulation technique. Messy is also used to describe anything from clothes left on the floor to in toys left out. Similar with "gross". You are trying to lump pollution with other benign activities to imply it isn't important.
An example where your argument doesn't play out like you say: many chemicals manufacturers decided to no longer sell chemicals that would be used for administering the death penalty via lethal injection. So many did this that states _had to basically stop applying the death penalty_, and basically try and trick companies to sell them the materials. A win for those who pushed for that to happen (mitigated by the endless cruelty of the SC but..). Alternative companies didn't show up to "fill the gap".
At one point doing things actually matters. Especially when we look at how large conglomerates own many parts of the value chain, at one point the end result is simply that these chemicals stop being used.
In this case, the environment and health will reap the benefits once 3M brings alternatives to market that can compete with the current “bad” options.
3M killing production and other signs of the product not having a future can drive away investments into competing suppliers.
I am sure proper research is being conducted to find replacements.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/1904/1/...
Well one hypothetical way it wouldn't apply is if the US federal government backed 3M's move and banned Chinese and other foreign companies from unfairly competing with a company that is choosing to avoid intentionally poisoning their customers.
some, however few and small, will choose to buy the new, more expensive, less convenient, less performant stuff for a variety of reasons, once it exists at all.
And as time goes on, pressures and variables change.
Nothing happens without starting somewhere, and the first step of ecery change that ever happened can always be characterized as impractical, ineffective, irrational. And yet, countless such changes have happened anyway despite those perfectly reasonable sounding arguments.
Sigh, there is no iteration of that logic that doesn't devolve to vacuous self-justification for engaging in immoral acts.
Also, performing a dirty industrial process in a country with strong environmental and workplace safety regulations is better than moving that process to a country with no protections.
Overheating teflon pans will kill any pet birds in the house. It's also not great for humans (but details have been suppressed by large corporate campaigns)
But try to find a pan without teflon?
impossible to determine (almost)
I remember finding that hexclad alledgedly doesn't use teflon...
until I found out they do ... and they put it on the OUTSIDE of the pan too. ugh.
The market signal on that using PFAS is imposes serious liabilities on a company is crystal clear. Even a giant like 3M is in rough waters because it cannot bear the liabilities.
It is common that large public companies deinvest some part of their business that cause bad PR. They usually sell a part of their business to a smaller/more anonymous/non-public company that is prepared to take the liabilities. In this case there is no indication of a possible sale of the 3M plants and a complete closure is the most likely scenario.
A second aspect is that many 3m-customers will be forced to reevaluate the decision to use PFAS. A good example is the usage in firefighting foam. Any producer of firefighting-foam is now fully aware that selling foam which is guaranteed to be released into the environment is a major liability.
There are even proposals to ban end-products that contain PFAS at the EU-level. Lobbying is not fully transparent, but I suspect 3M was one of the last strongholds that lobbied against such regulation.
Today, in many emerging markets environment law is weak or the enforcement is absent today. However, we see that all emerging markets are catching-up. In 5 to 10 years PFAS-producers will face a similar regulatory risk in some emerging markets.
The last element is that the market-share of 3M was huge. It is unlikely that competitors in emerging markets can fill that gap in 3 years.
In the short term, we will see some PFAS-producing companies in emerging markets making record profits because of this decision. However, I think it is unlikely that growth in emerging markets will come even close to filling this gap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerant#Phasing_out_of_CFC...
Again, I'm not saying these aren't necessary, but there's little in the way of cost/benefit analysis. Harmful effects are in some sense inevitable, but they should be weighed relative to the benefits added.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerant#Phasing_out_of_CFC...
So long as they can use an issue to lead the line of lemmings into the polling place you will never see nuanced opinion from politicians on an issue.
Politicians in Texas know full well how rare and irrelevant late term abortions that aren't medically necessary are. Politicians in California know full well how rare and irrelevant murders by people wielding military style arms are. But they still spew falsehoods because that is what is politically useful.
Huh, TIL. I was going to rebut this but I looked into it. I didn't realize simply the presence of a -CF3 group is enough to classify the whole molecule as a PFAS according to new definitions.
> More recently (2021) the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) expanded the definition, stating that "PFASs are defined as fluorinated substances that contain at least one fully fluorinated methyl or methylene carbon atom (without any H/Cl/Br/I atom attached to it), i.e. with a few noted exceptions, any chemical with at least a perfluorinated methyl group (–CF3) or a perfluorinated methylene group (–CF2–) is a PFAS."[3][4]
That's a super popular moeity in medchem for whatever reason, so yeah, RIP all thing trifluoromethyl.
Difluromethylene can be degraded much more quickly as long as the molecule can be "unzipped" (needs a break point where nucleophilic attack can occur), so it's possible we may be able to sub in -CHF2 or -CH2F to "cap" molecules and render them less persistent.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.0c03244
> "We here distinguish between fluoropolymer substances, fluoropolymer products, and fluoropolymers in finished articles. A fluoropolymer substance such as PTFE, FEP, and PFA is a material of known chemical structure. A fluoropolymer product is the actual material produced and sold by a chemical manufacturer (e.g., Chemours, Solvay, Daikin, Asahi Glass, etc.), it comes in different grades (e.g., Teflon-granulate, Teflon-fine powder, etc.), and may contain impurities from the production process. These fluoropolymer products are sold to manufacturers of finished articles (e.g., PTFE tape, waterproof clothing with a PTFE membrane, PTFE-coated cookware, etc.) who incorporate the fluoropolymer products in their finished articles. The distinction is important, as there are many different processes of making fluoropolymer products..."
TLDR: The authors generally conclude consumer products made with fluoropolymers are going to leach PFAS & similar eventually via waste disposal, and suggest restricting use to closed-loop industrial processes (where fluoropolymer plastics are often used to contain highly corrosive substances in chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturing processes).
Even “forever contaminants” would be a major improvement.
Just being a chemical that hangs around isn’t a bad thing. By that definition water is a “forever chemical”. I am well aware this isn’t what’s meant by forever chemical but the naming should involve something implying the negativity other than the ignorant use of chemical as a negative.
Perfluoralkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) do not break down quickly and have in recent years been found in dangerous concentrations in drinking water, soils and foods.
Those words need context, otherwise this reads a lot like scaremongering. Dangerous as in close to an LD50? A minimum measured effect? Or in layman: how much worse/better are exposure to those concentrations than say time-equivalent exposure to second-hand cigarette smoke? Or first-hand.
>in drinking water, soils and foods.
Routes of introduction to people and environment are also important to understand to eliminate hazards while minimizing damage. Is the contamination a production 'sloppiness' issue? Resulting from correct or incorrect application of non-durable goods (e.g. lubricants, firefighting foam). A wear of durable goods issue (rubbers, PTFE, etc.)?
The article gives a perfectly good overview for people that don't know the term.
There are a number of dangers associated with exposure to forever chemicals. Some of the potential health effects of PFAS include:
- Increased risk of cancer: Some studies have suggested that exposure to PFAS may increase the risk of certain types of cancer, including testicular, kidney, and pancreatic cancer.
- Harm to the immune system: PFAS have been shown to impair the immune system and interfere with the body's ability to produce antibodies.
- Developmental and reproductive problems: PFAS have been linked to developmental problems in infants and children, including low birth weight and reduced fertility in women.
- Thyroid hormone disruption: PFAS have been shown to disrupt the normal functioning of the thyroid gland, which can lead to problems with metabolism and energy levels.
- Other health effects: Other potential health effects of PFAS exposure include liver damage, high cholesterol, and decreased effectiveness of vaccines.
It is important to note that the extent of the health risks associated with PFAS exposure is still being studied, and more research is needed to understand the full range of potential effects on human health.
My personal prediction is that this will be like leaded gasoline all over again, but much much worse. We're already seeing these chemicals in drinking water all over the globel, in concentrations above limits deemed "safe".
They don't break down in the natural environment, thus why we accumulate it faster than we can filter it.
They can be broken down under high pressure i.e. hydrothermal carbonization(HTC).
The only solution I can see to remove them (over the course of decades / centuries) is to run all of our sewage through HTC
https://www.zeiss.com/content/dam/Vision/Vision/Internationa...
Yep, it’s water plus various non-polymer perfluoro compounds.
I get why fluoropolymers are extremely useful (and probably fairly safe for their end users). I get why PFCs are useful in industrial processes. But why on Earth is it acceptable to intentionally use PFCs as the primary ingredients in a spray bottle intended to be used near people’s faces?
I’m not being argumentative, just curious, as I’m not a chemist. I know it’s already being replaced in ski waxes and I’m pretty sure they have alternatives for firefighting foams?
On the other hand, for most kinds of chemical manufacturing and of chemical analyses fluoropolymers are truly indispensable.
Before the invention of the fluoropolymers, some of the chemical reactions that are done now in vessels made of fluoropolymers could not be done at all, while the others were done in platinum vessels. Even the platinum was slowly dissolved, so the cost of the equipment was huge and such chemical reactions could not be used in mass manufacturing.
Even the simplest transistor or integrated circuit cannot be made without fluoropolymers. Without them there cannot be any semiconductor industry.
Besides the containment of corrosive substances, other applications for which there are no good alternatives to fluoropolymers are in vacuum equipment (also indispensable for the semiconductor industry) and in insulators with low dielectric constant and with low losses at high frequencies.
None of the industrial uses of fluoropolymers can cause significant pollution. However using them in things like kitchenware, or worse, in packaging, makes no sense.
I presume it is possible for these industrial uses to cause significant pollution, but you mean that it is not difficult to prevent pollution from these processes because they happen in controlled locations?
Contrasting that against PFAS in kitchenware, packaging, or rain-coats where pollution is incredibly difficult to prevent because low-level leakage occurs everywhere?
I believe a lot of PFAS contamination comes from the production process itself. Especially looking at the 3M plant in Belgium. To what degree can the production process be made contamination free?
Fluoropolymers don't really leach in significant quantities on commercial timescales. That would sort of defeat their purpose of being inert. So there is a huge difference between "these teflon o-rings in this chemical plant leach 0.1 ppb of small molecule PFAS per day" and "millions of teflon pans go into the landfill each year". And further still to "we produce railcars worth of volatile fluoropolymer monomers for producing teflon and viton".
> I believe a lot of PFAS contamination comes from the production process itself.
This exactly. Low-molecular-weight PFAS are much more mobile than high weight, thus more polluting. Once "bound" in a polymer, the leaching is minimal. The problem is the production process, where you have primarily the small molecules, which inevitably get into the environment.
I hope 3M will be fined to hell (possible) and responsible managers will rot in jail (unprobable as always). I mean that's sole role of any manager - being responsible for all the crap happening under their command, good or bad. 'I didn't know' is not an excuse when we know 3M knew damn too well and dumped superbad waste anyway.
--
§ PFAS: Rainwater contains unsafe levels of 'forever chemicals'
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/pfas-in-rainwater-...
I mean, it's not a ship at sea running at flank speed where the ship keeps moving once power has been cut. Just stop making them. Now.
According to the article, PFAS are used in semiconductor manufacturing process. These are insanely sensitive processes, and replacements will need to be found and qualified. That takes time. (Note: I'd hope they've seen the writing on the wall and have already started this process.)
Now, can we shut down Chemours too? DuPont spun them off in 2015 to isolate their risk.
So what are the clean-up costs? Is it even possible or do they just clean up the most urgent parts?
So, no.